Persons’ freedom to communicate, and their ability to do so
effectively, has long been recognized as a crucial component of a society that
respects human dignity and provides the conditions for humans to flourish.
Government actions that suppress persons’ speech and other forms of
communication have been rightly subject to scrutiny and challenge. Governments
have also recognized the importance of affirmative steps to enhance persons’
opportunities for communications; such steps include improving education and
supporting public forums. Communication is not only a personal and political
good but also central to economic development. With the growth of the
information and communication industries, freedom in communications is becoming
increasingly important to persons’ entrepreneurial and productive activities.

While the political and economic importance of personal
communications is well-established, government communications has been largely
relegated to invisibility in policy discourse.[2]
The inevitability of government communications is a banality: government as a
purposeful organization of persons and physical objects (buildings, cars,
desks, computers, etc.) does not exist in a state of symbolic suspension, and
even government officials’ attempts to be silent can send loud messages. Of
course elected and even appointed government officials are keenly concerned
about press and television coverage, and there are norms and laws concerning
how public officials can use their offices as part of their own permanent
popularity campaigns. But most of most government institutions are
non-partisan and not personalized. Most government communications seeks to
provide information, to shun expression of multiple, contrasting, or
distinctive viewpoints, and to avoid attracting more attention than is
necessary for a particular, narrow function.

The future may benefit from a much broader and more
significant role for government communications. The development of the
Internet potentially can provide ubiquitous, low cost, multi-media
communications capabilities. The cost of communicating via cultivating relationships
with journalists, staging media events, and buying advertising is likely to
rise relative to the cost of more direct channels of communication from
government to constituents. Governments, while they are likely to outsource to
commercial businesses many aspects of their communications needs, will have
much better opportunities to retain editorial control in their communications.
Cheaper, more capable communications channels provide governments with an
important new tool for

Government is an important provider of information and
services. The UK E-Minister recently declared, “Government information is the
largest information resource available to the UK.”[3]
Government publications include studies, laws, official statistics, transcripts
of hearings and proceedings, material submitted for public consideration as
part of hearings or proceedings, and a variety of other material. The US
Government Printing Office issued about 18000 new titles in 1999, a volume
equal to about a quarter of the total number of new books and new editions
published in the US.[4]
Routine, widely experienced transactions with government include renewing a
driver’s license, getting a marriage license or registering a birth, paying
taxes and fines, obtaining information about public parks and recreational
opportunities, inquiring into laws and legislative developments, and voting.

Developing a brand is an important part of a communications
strategy. Governments have the advantage of distinctive brands with a high
level of public awareness. Most persons know the name of the country in which
they reside. Flags, anthems, and less prominently, seals, developed as part of
building national government brands. Government in a geographic area typically
has many sub-brands such as national, state, and local governments, and
associated particular government bodies and agencies. Persons’ views about
government do not relate just to specific products – did the government get me
something specific that I wanted – but are typically based on a broad range of
emotions, images, and self-images. Thus citizens may strongly fear government
intrusions on personal freedom or strongly support government action, without
reference to any particular government actions. Such broad, emotion-laden
images and associations are characteristic of a well-recognized, powerful brand
name.

While governments have a strong brand, they typically
advertise relatively little. Prior to and during WWI and WWII, the US federal
government carried out major advertising campaigns to boost public morale and
generate support for the war effort. US federal government advertising is
typically focuses on military recruitment (particularly with a professional,
non-conscripted armed forces) and postal services. In 1999 US federal
government advertising expenditure amounted to $548 million, which is 0.3% of
total US advertising spending.[5]
The Ad Council, a US non-profit organization that provides advertising on
behalf of government and non-government public service campaigns, provided
about $1.2 billion of media spots in 1998.[6]
US state and local governments also did some advertising, primarily for
lotteries, tourism, and economic development. Over-all US government
advertising spending in 1999 (including the value of donated time and space)
probably amounted to less than 1% of total US advertising spending. For comparision,
US federal government expenditure amounts to about 20% of GDP.[7]
In other high-income countries, governments typically do more advertising and
play a larger part in the economy. But government advertising and
communications in most high-income countries appears to be small relative to
governments’ share of goods and services in the over-all economy.

Many governments are moving aggressively to provide services
electronically. Under terms such as government online, electronic government,
and e-government, governments are seeking to use the Internet to provide
services cheaper, faster, more conveniently, and more effectively.[8]
Singapore’s eCitizen Central portal (www.ecitizen.gov.sg) and the Centrelink
portal in Australia (www.centrelink.gov.au) are among the early, important
examples of these developments. In the US, the state of California has
recently established an impressive e-government portal (my.ca.gov), and the
state of Texas has set out an ambitious program for e-government.[9]
These uses of the Internet focus on functionality and service provision with a
literal, instrumental approach to communications. Attracting and holding
attention does not appear to be a significant goal.

While governments are moving aggressively to provide
services online, the amount of attention that government websites currently
attract is relatively small. Table 1 shows page views among US users at the
top non-government and government websites in May, 1999. The top 10 government
websites taken together had less total page views than a electronic greeting
card site, less than a commercial weather site, and less than a pornography
site. Whatever one’s views about the appropriate scope of government, it seems
reasonable that government should be able to attract a larger share of its
citizens’ online attention than such commercial sites.

Table 1

Web Traffic Among
US Users, May 1999

Address

Site Type

Rank

Page Views

Top 10
Non-Government Sites

msn.com

content community

1

9,837,705

yahoo.com

portal

2

8,289,934

microsoft.com

software company

3

1,392,064

ebay.com

online auction

4

1,355,412

excite.com

search engine

5

1,354,463

aol.com

content community

6

1,302,714

altavista.com

search engine

7

1,152,986

go.com

portal

8

897,919

geocities.com

online community

9

811,574

lycos.com

search engine

10

670,455

Top 10 Government
Sites

nasa.gov

space exploration

140

70,194

nih.gov

health research

189

58,260

irs.gov

taxes

272

41,450

ca.gov

state government

360

30,333

noaa.gov

weather

404

27,384

loc.gov

national library

412

27,197

usps.gov

postal service

440

25,563

ustreas.gov

treasury

502

22,608

ed.gov

education

530

21,519

wa.gov

state government

705

17,093

Total Top 10 non-government sites

27,065,226

Total Top 10 government sites

341,601

Source: Alexa Research Top 1000 Sites.
See

http://www.alexaresearch.com/clientdir/products/top_websites.php

II. Increasing Attention to Government

The
inter-relationship of money, media time, and politics is widely considered to
be a major challenge to inclusive, responsive political culture and effective
democratic government. European countries that require broadcasters to provide
free time to political candidates face increasing regulatory challenges as the
number of broadcast outlets increases, as traditional relationships between
government and media change, and as cross-media competition increases. In the US,
which does not require broadcasters to provide free time to candidates, the
need to raise money for political advertising is a central aspect of elections.
About 75% of US presidential campaign funds go for political advertising, and
about 90% of that advertising spending is for network television and local spot
television advertising.[10]
Politicians appear to be caught in a escalating but narrowly focused form of
advertising competition. This particular form of competition is widely thought
to be failing to produce significant public benefits.

The development of new channels for political communications
can help to reshape electoral competition into a more beneficial form. In
politics as in economics, the key to changing the form of competition is
changing industry structure. Changes in communications industry structure
could provide a much wider range of effective opportunities for political communications.
In particular, if state communications channels attract significant public
attention, they could play an important part in provide candidates with
significant, fair access to the public. Think of organizing candidate
communications on a government website. The challenge is not primarily
technological: candidates can and have set up their own websites as
communications channels. The challenge is to attract significant public
attention and to structure communications in an appealing, fair, deliberatively
fruitful way.

State communication channels, by converging editorial
control with political responsibility, could help to foster needed separation
between politics and business for many other actors in the information
economy. High profile political issues such as decency in programming, the
amount of children’s programming, and the provision of programming for minority
groups could be addressed much more directly through state communications
channels. The need for media entrepreneurs to link their profit-oriented
businesses to ideas of public trusteeship would be greatly reduced. The
information industry could become less politicized, while politics could become
less commercialized.

While e-government web portals point to the development of
new state communications channels that could attract significant public
attention, they have been taking a narrow, functional-transactional approach
to communications. E-government efforts have been closely linked to the
discourse of business productivity. Their motivation has been based on
business models: “Citizens want the same one-stop shopping and
service-in-an-instant options from their government as they do from private
business.”[11]
E-government has been presented as “the coming of the new government
enterprise,” one that will “provide customer service equal to the best in
business.”[12]
Leading e-government portals are structured in terms of typical needs of
everyday life, and governments have issued orders promoting the use of “plain
language.”[13]
In terms of attentional economics, e-government efforts communicate like
product advertisements in the mid-nineteenth century: they emphasize provision
of service, functionality, and efficiency.[14]

E-government efforts could do much more to attract attention
to state-owned-and-controlled media. Drawing upon lessons from the historical
success of newspapers, e-government portals could seek to provide daily content
that creates and advances stories that attract wide, habitual attention. The
historical evidence on advertising shows clearly that artfully chosen words can
attract attention by creating appealing images, impressions, and fantasies.
Many governments are extensively involved in lotteries, which could provide an
important source of exclusive content for attracting attention.[15]
More attention could also be placed on presenting personalities in affective,
intimate contexts. Governments, like other media owners, could also acquire
content through syndication. Even without streaming audio and video, a
feasible goal for a government owned-and-controlled channel on the Internet is
to become a major focus of attention among citizens.

Despite its painful historical images and associations,
government communications is likely to grow significantly in importance with
the growth of information societies. Government communications can address
important political problems more effectively than other instruments while
remaining faithful to liberal, democratic values. Government communications
are currently greatly underdeveloped relative to other aspects of government,
and the growth of the information society is likely to spur the development of
this aspect of government.

III. Promoting
the Commercial Viability of New Media

Government communications can also play an important role in
stimulating the development of private, commercial communications
opportunities. The private, commercial development of information industries
faces some significant challenges. Content industries, i.e. industries producing
digital artifacts embodying human intellectual and creative labor, currently
provide much less revenue for network operators than point-to-point
communications.[16]
Yet technology is rapidly reducing the cost of standardized, universal
point-to-point communications.[17]
If the distinction between content industries and point-to-point communications
remains fundamental, and if the information economy is primarily about the
latter services, then private, competitive institutions may become
dysfunctional and marginalized in the information economy.[18]
Moreover, established businesses interests may strongly resist change if they
perceive no viable business models for exploiting new technological
opportunities.

A dynamic, innovative communications industry needs a
propitious environment for commercial provision of content and services on the
Internet. A well-recognized challenge currently associated with commercial
Internet content and services is that persons have become accustomed to getting
such content and services for free.[19]
Many Internet users are unwilling, because of what they have learned through
their past use of Internet services, to consider seriously providing money as
part of an exchange associated with particular Internet content or services.
Services that cost money are not considered worthy of attention. In addition,
privacy rights, transaction terms, and use rights associated with digital
content lack legitimated standards that economize on human attention.[20]
These features of current attentional economics undoubtedly cause a substantial
reduction in the multiplicity of socially valued digital content and services.
They also lessen the opportunities for creating jobs and economic opportunity
in the information sector of the economy.

Government communications often are not recognized as being a
important policy instrument for fostering the development of an information
society. Governments that sell information tend to charge high prices and
engage in little marketing effort. This approach naturally leads to other
government agencies being the largest customers for government information, low
over-all sales, and failure to recover costs of generating the information.[21]
An alternative approach is to provide information for free.[22]
This leads to much greater dissemination of information, but re-enforces
citizens’ patterns of attention that hinder the development of commercial
information sources and services. Both approaches fail to consider government
communications within a sufficiently broad policy framework.

Government communications should seek to foster patterns of
citizen attention that encourage the growth of both non-commercial and
commercial sources and outlets of information. First, government information
provision should seek to develop in citizens a willingness to consider
including some money as part of an online exchange. Providing some widely
demanded government products for a low fee online would help to do that. The
point of the fee would not be to raise money or recover costs, but to teach
citizens not to reject, as undeserving of attention, online information and
services that require money as part of the transaction. Second, transactions
should be structured so as to promote widely accepted standards or rights for
making online transactions and using digital content included in such
transactions. The credibility of the government as a legitimate authority
could help to establish reasonable norms for online transactions. The
development of such norms is crucial for economically efficient use of
citizens’ attention.

Widespread habits of media use are difficult to change and
have great commercial significance. State communications channels, if they have
sufficient public salience, can be important policy instruments for affecting
media use. Governments that seek to foster the development of new
communications technologies and a more dynamic information society need such
policy instruments. In the media environment of the future, state
communications channels can coexist with and promote the development of
diverse, private, commercial media.

IV. Conclusions

E-government should embrace an agenda much more ambitious
than re-inventing the government in the form of a business enterprise.
E-government represents a new form of state media, one that is unlikely to be
able to serve as an instrument of totalitarian oppression, one that instead
offers great promise for reshaping democratic politics and stimulating economic
opportunities. Government communications need not be invisible. It can
usefully seek to attract significant attention in an information society that
embraces freedom and democracy.

[1]
The opinions and conclusions expressed in this paper are those of the author.
They do not necessarily reflect the views of the Federal Communications
Commission, its Commissioners, or any staff other than the author. I am
grateful for numerous FCC colleagues who have shared their insights and
experience with me. Author’s address: [email protected]; FCC, 445 12’th St. SW,
Washington, DC 20554, USA. This paper is based upon the third part (Section
VI) of a broader paper on convergence; see “Communications Policy, Media
Development, and Convergence,” available at http://www.galbithink.org .

[2]
“Students of the [US] Constitution endlessly debate whether small groups of
Nazis may march. But the march of government, a communicator immensely more
powerful than a small group of malcontents, is ignored. Few legal theories or
concepts of speech in a liberal democracy reach beyond government regulation of
private speech to consider the government’s own involvement in communication
enterprises.” Yudof, Mark G., When Government Speaks: Politics, Law, and
Government Expression in America (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1983) p. 16. The situation has not changed significantly since Yudof
wrote. There has, however, been some important recent work on government
communications. See Greene, Abner S., “Government of the Good,” Vanderbilt
Law Review Vol. 53, No. 1 (Jan. 2000); Rose, Jonathon W., Making
“pictures in our heads”: government advertising in Canada (Westport,
CN: Praeger, 2000).

[4]
See Biennial Report to Congress on the Status of GPO Access, Appendix C;
online at http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/aces/biennial/index.html . For the
number of book titles, see Statistical Abstract, Table 938.

[5]
The US federal advertising figure is from US government accounting systems.
See US General Accounting Office, Federal Advertising Contracts: Agencies
Have Discretion in Setting Work Scope and Requirements GAO/GGD-00-203
(Sept. 2000) p. 3. US government advertising spending does not appear to be
consistently defined and tracked. See GAO, Federal Advertising Contracts:
Distribution to Small Disadvantaged Businesses, GAO/GGD-00-102R (April 17,
2000) Figure 1, p. 4; LNA/MediaWatch, Ad $ Summary, various years (New
York: Competitive Media Reporting, various dates), Table of Leading National
Advertisers; Advertising Age, Ad Age Dataplace, 100 Leading National
Advertisers, various years, on the web at http://adage.com/dataplace/index.html
. The total advertising figure is from Robert Coen’s compilation. See
http://www.mccann.com/html/coenreport.html .

[7]Central
government expenditure in high-income countries typically amounts to 35-45% of
GDP. See World Bank, World Development Report 2000/2001, Selected World
Development Indicators, Table 14; available online at
http://www.worldbank.org/poverty/wdrpoverty/report/index.htm . Note that
central government expenditure includes transfer payments for social security
and health that are economic transactions but are not included in GDP.
Government (final) consumption as a share of GDP in high-income countries is
about 15-20%. See Id. Table 13.

[8]
See, for example, Government Online, The Commonwealth Government’s Strategy
(April 2000) [Australia],
http://www.ieg.ibm.com/pdf/GovernmentOnlineStrategy.pdf ; eEurope 2002
Action Plan: Government online [European Union], at
http://europa.eu.int/comm/information_society/eeurope/actionplan/actline3b_en.htm
; Contract with the future, A vision on the electronic relationship between
government and citizen (19 May 2000) [Netherlands], at
http://www.ieg.ibm.com/pdf/future.pdf ; National Partnership for Reinventing
Government, E-Gov (April 2000) [United States], at
http://www.npr.gov/library/VisionddB1.htm .

[9]
See e-Texas, Report of the e-Texas Commission (20 December 2000), online at

[13]
Singapore’s widely acclaimed e-government portal is structured in terms of
life events. See www.ecitizen.gov.sg . A requirement to use plain language
has been issued as part of the US program to re-invent the Federal Government.
See http://www.plainlanguage.gov/cites/memo.htm .

[14]
For an interesting analysis of the shift from narrow, production-oriented
advertisements to broad, consumer-oriented lifestyle advertisements, a shift
which took place in the US between 1895 and 1905, see Laird, Pamela Walker, Advertising
Progress: American business and the rise of consumer marketing (Baltimore,
MD: The John Hopkins Press, 1998).

[15]
Total lottery sales in the US in 1996 amounted to $42.9 billion. There is a virtual
government monopoly in the US on lotteries, and lotteries generated for US
governments (primarily state government) $13.8 billion in revenue 1996. There
are important policy issues and many different policy directions associated
with state-run lotteries. These issues are now being studied and discussed.
See National Gambling Impact Study Commission, http://www.ngisc.gov . On
lotteries, see Research on Lotteries, online at
http://www.ngisc.gov/research/lotteries.html , and Clotfelfter, Charles T., Philip
J. Cook, Julie A. Edell, and Marian Moore, “State Lotteries at the Turn of the
Century: Report to the National Gambling Impact Study Commission,” April 23,
1999, esp. pp. 21-25; online at http://www.ngisc.gov/reports/lotfinal.pdf .

[16]
The is a major theme of Andrew Odlyzko’s important recent work, “The history of
communications and its implications for the Internet” (Prel. ver. June 16, 2000), online at http://www.research.att.com/~amo .

[17]
As pointed out in Galbi, Douglas, “the price of telecom competition,” info
vol. 1 no. 2 (April 1999), advertising and promotional expenses for US
long-distance telephone companies in a single year are about the same magnitude
as the total capital cost of building a national network that could provide all
residents of the US free long distance telephone service. Point-to-point
communications are highly valued, but the costs of providing standard,
point-to-point communications services, apart from marketing and promoting, is
plummeting. That’s why most analysts consider consumer long-distance telephone
services, which generated about $30 billion in revenue in 1997, to be a dying
business. See also, Galbi, Douglas, “Regulating Prices for Shifting Between
Service Providers,” draft available on http://www.galbithink.org , revised
version forthcoming in Information Economics and Policy.

[18]
The growth of government-owned networks reflects this dynamic. Similarly,
discussions of the “end-to-end” principle and “open access” often implicitly
present a single, universal public common-carrier network as the industry
configuration that best serves the public interest.

[19]
A recent Wall Street Journal article described the following comment as typical
of those on Napster’s message boards following its announcement that it would
be developing a fee-based service: “Napster=FREE/If Napster decides to not =
free any longer then I will switch to another freebie/There are many out there.
…/The Internet is a great place, you can get whatever you want on here. No
matter what./Free Free Free.” The article then went on to note: “Such a
sentiment can only leave one wondering which battle cry for the Internet will
ultimately win out: “Live free or die,” or “Live free and die.” Kara Swisher,
“Sites Eschew Giveaways in Favor of Charging”, December 4, 2000.

[20]
For example, considerable attention would be required to evaluate a website’s
privacy statement without any additional information about its normal status.

[22]
An insightful recent discussion of digital access to law proposes that laws, as
well as other public political information, be provided for free on the
Internet. See McMahon, Tom, “Improving Access to the Law in Canada With
Digital Media” Government Information in Canada/Information gouvernementales au
Canada No. 16 (March 1999) [http://www.usask.ca/library/gic/16/mcmahon.html ].
This article notes that

California has a statutory requirement that laws be
published for free on the Internet, while the Australasian Legal Information
Institute (AustLII) recommends that public bodies should provide public
information on a marginal cost-recovery basis.